I disagree. It means that everyone has to wait for another experienced monk to revaluate and approve your work.

If anything, this is precisely what we've asked of folks all along. Simply wait for someone else to verify that you haven't temporarily lost your sanity. Unfortunately, that's not being honored by certain members of out community.

To my mind, the additional work (if any) greatly offsets the risk of a sneaky troll.

As a level 10 monks, I can be trusted...

No, as a level 10 monk, you are subjected to the same level of peer review as a first time novice. To my mind, that's more democratic because it helps ensure that everyone is treated reasonably fairly.

"Dead in the water" problem

Given the rather large number of international members, it's very unlikely that you won't see a reply within short order. Besides, there are other avenues you can pursue for more immediate response, e.g. the IRC channels, UseNet, even paid support.

Along the same lines, it's likely that the people that can help you bail yourself out of water know that you can show unapproved content in Newest Nodes by changing a setting in your User Profile. Thus, you will likely not be penalized for not being able to approve your own node.

And as far as TheDamian goes, well, that may be true. And while I respect his experience and knowledge very, very highly, I doubt he's the only name in the rolls that can answer emergency posts.

And even if he is, he's not the only one that can approve nodes. Thus, all you have to do is a) make sure you post a reasonable node (by doing your homework first) and b) find someone online that can approve your node for you.

Your viewpoint was represented in the discussions I referred to. The overall consensus, though, was pretty heavily weighted in favor of removing both settings.

That's fine. As for your second point, I think you are taking it out of context. I without a doubt am "trusted" to approve or frontpage a node. I have the ability and occasionally even exercise it. I haven't seen (Though haven't been looking for it) really any abuse of the approval powers. Now frontpaging on the other hand....

Let's agree to disagree. I'm not that concerned about it. Though I will point out the fact that anyone over level 5 could fairly quickly boost an alternative nic to level 5 and approve/frontpage/etc their own nodes so I don't think you really solve anything. Anyone who really wants to whore, will.